Digital Minimalism
An argument for intentionally reducing technology use and social media consumption to reclaim attention, time, and mental well-being.
For heavy internet users, repeated interaction with this darkness can become a source of draining negativity—a steep price that many don’t even realize they’re paying to support their compulsive connectivity.
Our Paleolithic brain categorizes ignoring a newly arrived text the same as snubbing the tribe member trying to attract your attention by the communal fire: a potentially dangerous social faux pas.
In my experience covering these topics, it’s hard to permanently reform your digital life through the use of tips and tricks alone. The problem is that small changes are not enough to solve our big issues with new technologies. The underlying behaviors we hope to fix are ingrained in our culture,
Digital Minimalism A philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else.
minimalists don’t mind missing out on small things; what worries them much more is diminishing the large things they already know for sure make a good life good.
Walden: “The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”6,7
My general heuristic is the following: consider the technology optional unless its temporary removal would harm or significantly disrupt the daily operation of your professional or personal life.
To allow an optional technology back into your life at the end of the digital declutter, it must: Serve something you deeply value (offering some benefit is not enough). Be the best way to use technology to serve this value (if it’s not, replace it with something better). Have a role in your life that is constrained with a standard operating procedure that specifies when and how you use it.
Solitude requires you to move past reacting to information created by other people and focus instead on your own thoughts and experiences—wherever you happen to be.
Solitude Deprivation A state in which you spend close to zero time alone with your own thoughts and free from input from other minds.
subtler effect is the way that digital communication tools can subvert the offline communication that remains in your life. Because our primal instinct to connect is so strong, it’s difficult to resist checking a device in the middle of a conversation with a friend or bath time with a child—reducing the quality of the richer interaction right in front of us. Our analog brain cannot easily distinguish between the importance of the person in the room with us and the person who just sent us a new text.
To click “Like,” within the precise definitions of information theory, is literally the least informative type of nontrivial communication, providing only a minimal one bit of information about the state of the sender
It’s now easy to fill the gaps between work and caring for your family and sleep by pulling out a smartphone or tablet, and numbing yourself with mindless swiping and tapping. Erecting barriers against the existential is not new—before YouTube we had (and still have) mindless television and heavy drinking to help avoid deeper questions—but the advanced technologies of the twenty-first-century attention economy are particularly effective at this task.
In the fall of 1832, a French packet ship named Sully left Le Havre en route to New York. On board was a forty-one-year-old painter traveling home from a European tour in which his work had failed to generate much notice. His name was Samuel Morse. As the historian Simon Winchester recounts, it was on this journey, somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic, that Morse “experienced the epiphany that would help him change the world.”1 The catalyst for this moment was a fellow passenger, Charles Jackson, a Harvard geologist who happened to be up to date on recent discoveries in the study of electricity. As the two men discussed potential uses for this new medium, they stumbled across a remarkable insight. As Morse recalls thinking: “If the presence of electricity can be made visible in any part of the circuit, I see no reason why intelligence may not be transmitted by electricity.”2